Elicit the Requirements on Software Dependability: A Knowledge-Based Approach

Dependability, which is regarded to be an integrative concept characterized by properties such as reliability, safety, security, and maintainability, has been paid more and more attentions recently. However, it has not been followed with enough interest by traditional requirements engineering approaches. This paper proposes a knowledge based approach for dependability requirements elicitations. This approach argues that the knowledge captured from the data about software failure can be utilized for the dependable system development. A classification scheme of the threats to system dependability has been given and a meta-model of the dependability-related knowledge has been built. On the basis of the unified model of dependability (UMD), this paper utilizes the knowledge to help the elicitation of stakeholders´ requirements on the system dependability. An online banking system has been used for illustrating the feasibility of our approach.